


Dressed in Embarrassment; Dressed in Wine

by with_the_monsters



Category: Dominion (TV)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-20
Updated: 2015-11-20
Packaged: 2018-05-02 14:15:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5251256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/with_the_monsters/pseuds/with_the_monsters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the fight, it's a slow crawl back to sanity. Alex and Michael and Noma try to hold themselves together, but things always slip through the cracks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dressed in Embarrassment; Dressed in Wine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vilefangirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vilefangirl/gifts).



> For vilefangirl on tumblr for the Dominion 2015 gift exchange! I was going to write a much shorter piece with Chosen One transformations like you wanted, but this sort of happened instead. I'm so sorry, and I hope it's up to par.
> 
> Title from "For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti" by Sufjan Stevens. The Good Natured's cover was my go-to repeat while writing this, especially for Noma's sections.
> 
> I didn't have time to go back and rewatch seasons one and two so please forgive any inaccuracies or errors!

—

 

Did you ever notice how in the Bible, whenever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel? – Thomas Daggett, _The Prophecy_

 

—

 

**ALEX**

After the tunnel, he keeps seeing light.

Michael finds him in the dark, the heels of his hands pressed hard against his eyes like he can block the brightness out. (His arms alight, his body heady with the power of the eviction. God in his heart like a fire.) The archangel hovers on the edge of a sentence for so long that Alex takes pity on him, eventually, and pulls his hands away.

“I’m alright,” he says, not sounding it. “Nomes, she didn’t—she just flew off. Didn’t try to kill me. Which was…you know, nice of her.”

Michael hesitates a second longer. Alex doesn’t even have the energy to enjoy it. Michael uncertain is his favourite thing. Or was one of his favourite things, anyway. Before. Blue eyes cast aside, riptide arms uneasy and restless. Those long years of life and the simple messiness of humanity is all that it takes to confound him.

If he wasn’t so tired, Alex might be gracious again and ask him a question. Give him something to focus on, something to lead with. But he _is_ tired—so tired, right down to his bones—and so he just pulls his knees up and drops his forehead onto them, grinding his eyes down to try to stop the light from flaring. It doesn’t work.

There’s a soft rustle from beside him. Alex tips his head sideways, cracks one eye open a sliver to find the archangel beside him. Michael on his ass in the grime and the blood is an unusual enough sight to have him reaching for a smile. He can’t quite get to it, though, so he settles for pulling his head back and letting it flop against the wall behind them, boneless and heavy.

Michael takes a deep breath in and lets it go through his nose. The sound echoes in the empty space. They’re the only ones here now: Noma had knocked the recently-evicted down like skittles as she fought her way down the tunnel, and once she was gone Alex had sent them all over the city. They’d just _done_ it. Done whatever he said. He can see them now, deferential and determined, eyes everywhere but on his and their arms flexing, just a little, still carrying the tingling shock of having their bodies back to themselves.

They’re out there now, he knows. Running all over this ground-down city, hunting down the last 8-balls and working to get the gates shut, the guns back online. Alex knows he should be out there with them. He should be on their screens, taking the words that Claire can’t say any more and shoring up their faith.

Instead he’s curled up in a stinking tunnel, bare inches from crying, with God’s own Sword and son lost for words beside him.

Alex laughs. He can’t help it. He catches Michael’s flickering gaze and snorts again, the sound halfway between amused and despairing.

“I just,” he begins, gesturing a helpless hand at the darkness around them, “We won, you know? We won. We saved the city.”

Michael at last has his opening. His voice is calm. He’s found the tone he uses for addressing the nervy senate, for placating uneasy humans.

“But you don’t feel like you did.”

Alex laughs again. The sound’s only ten percent mirth.

“Well, the first woman I ever loved and should-have-been mother of my child was shot to death right in front of me by her own father-slash-dyad,” he points out, voice steadily sarcastic, “And I left her body in the dirt like a dog. And then the woman—angel, sorry—that I thought would see out the end of the world with me sold her loyalty for a pair of wings. So, yeah, forgive me for feeling a little bit like I lost today.”

He doesn’t look at Michael. He can sense him the whole time, carefully not looking at him either.

“You’re a human,” Michael replies at last, shifting where he’s sat, something squelching beneath his thighs, “You couldn’t ever understand what our wings are to us. For Noma to have given hers up for you—that’s a love I’ve never seen the like of before.”

Alex sighs. That love would probably mean a lot more if she hadn’t abandoned him in favour of whatever master offered her her wings in exchange for her betrayal. What a treacherous heart she has.

“I’m getting used to angels ditching me,” he announces after a pause, shooting Michael the tiniest of grins. It is, after all, the only behavioural pattern they have consistently demonstrated. That and the most astonishing power to get up and keep going, no matter what is thrown at them.

Michael catches the grin and returns it, slightly unsure.

“In my defence, I didn’t want to leave this time,” he explains, wry and apologetic, “My brother is—we’ll say persuasive.”

“I heard he dragged you into the sky like a sack of potatoes.”

“That’s hardly an accurate description—” Michael begins, and then breaks himself off with a chuckle, shaking his head down at his boots. Alex shares in his amusement for a moment, but he can’t get it to stick.

“Go on, then,” he says, letting his head fall sideways to regard Michael. The archangel looks back at him, blue eyes steady. “Tell me what new shitstorm we’ve got headed our way.”

Michael breaks the gaze and casts his eyes upwards. Alex has always thought, in the very small and mostly-ignored part of himself that takes far more notice of the archangel than it ought, that the habit is a leftover from before the war. Back when Michael could look up and feel his father looking down, steadying and authoritative. Could look up and know he had a family to depend upon, their wings echoing back at him from the four corners of the Earth. It occurs to Alex in a way it never has before how lonely it must be to be Michael. To go from having a father and sisters—and, even more, a brother who lived inside his head—to being alone amongst a species who could never comprehend a life so long.

Michael drops his eyes so suddenly that he catches Alex staring. Alex draws his brows down into a frown. It always has to be a challenge. Always that insolence, the unwillingness to conform. If they can rely on nothing else they can rely on this dynamic. Reliable things, in this mad world, are hard to come by.

“So?” Alex prompts, not looking away.

“So,” Michael repeats, pressing his mouth into a thin, worried line before opening it again to speak. “Gabriel and I went to Mallory. It’s a town I came across—the 8-balls never touched them. They thought my father was protecting them but it…I guessed it wasn’t Father when I was first there. And I was right. It was—it’s my brother. Lucifer. The Son of Morning.”

Without him being aware it’s happening, Alex’s left hand reaches to press over the newest mark on his right forearm.

“You said—”

“Yes, the mark was warning us,” Michael cuts in. He sounds frustrated, but Alex doesn’t hunch his shoulders against it instinctively. He knows these days that the frustration is not intended for him.

Alex lets the silence sit for a while.

“I mean, okay,” he begins, only halfway decided where he’s going with this but sticking his neck out regardless, “I know you killed him. Had to kill him. But—would it be so bad, if he came back now? You’re not exactly rich in family, and it was your father who ordered his execution. You just…”

“I just followed orders,” Michael interrupts again, voice soft. “ _Befehl ist befehl_. I think Lucifer will feel the same way about that defence as the Allies did at the Nuremburg Trials.”

His voice is surprisingly harsh around the foreign words, scratchy in a way it never is when he speaks Lishepus. Alex feels that it would not be the time to point out that his knowledge of history stretches back about as far as The Extermination War, with the odd grand occurrence before that fissured in with no consistency or logic as to what he has been taught. So he knows about Columbus landing in America and definitely recalls something about an Ice Age or two, possibly overheard a V4 discussing a World War when he was stealing a bread roll as a teenager, and thinks he might have been educated about the dinosaurs dying out at one point. What with angels coming down to kill them and God being revealed to be existent—if absent—Alex is slightly unsure what the general consensus on evolution is these days.

“Well, anyway,” he replies, trying to convey through his tone that nothing of what Michael has said has made any sense to him at all, “You’re family, right? And he was cast down because he chose humanity.”

He looks at Michael now. The archangel is frowning at his hands, twisted together in his lap. What has he seen that has made him so certain his brother will not forgive him?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Michael says, not looking away from his hands, “You’re thinking that we must be aligned. Because I chose you humans too?”

Alex gazes at him a second longer and then heaves a quick, restless shrug.

“Well, sure. It would make sense.”

The corner of Michael’s mouth stretches up. He still won’t look at Alex.

“Only if you don’t know Lucifer.”

In the distance, a shout goes up. It sounds more triumphant than agonised. Michael’s gaze flickers towards it and then back. His expression doesn’t change; Alex doesn’t roar to his feet. He’s kept the observation to himself, but Michael moves like a cat. If you know him well enough, you can read what those heightened senses are telling him. A frown would mean he’s picked up something vaguely troublesome, a full-body shift means that he’s heard something he feels needs dealing with. Just as cats flick an ear or tilt their head or twitch their tails to tell you what they’re picking up, so Michael gives himself away with millimetres of movement.

Alex knowing this doesn’t mean anything special. Most of the archangel corps have spent enough time at his back to read their leader’s body language. Maybe they all feel the same split-second tightness in their chest when they forget to not notice the beauty of his hands, the sinuous grace of his walk. Alex has never checked.

“So tell me about him,” Alex says once the shout has faded away into the dusty air.

Michael lifts his beautiful hands and lets them fall, fast and sloppy.

“Tell you what? That he was the best of us, the boldest and cleverest? Father loved him so, so much. He was the first and the brightest. We couldn’t—none of us could ever measure up. We never even tried. We loved him too. Our big brother,” he adds, words acidic and regretful. “We watched him fall in love with humans and we never thought… we just looked for all the things he saw to love. Gabriel got closest. I think he would have followed him down if it wasn’t for me. Then—Father gave him chances. Three chances. More than he’d have given us. But Lucifer squandered them all and Father came to us and gave the order.”

Michael looks so small, suddenly. So small and sad. Alex is jolted hard back to a rusty storage cupboard on an upper level in New Delphi, blood on the plastic and Michael cringing away like a wounded animal, shaking arms raised before his face.

Uncertain, Alex shifts himself a bare inch closer. Michael doesn’t acknowledge where their elbows now brush, but he seems to take a slice of comfort from it. He steadies, grows again. Fills the space around him.

“Anyway, it took the four of us days on end to finally destroy him. Then, after—it took me years to comfort Gabriel. To make him understand why Father had made us commit such a crime against our own brother. Raphael too, with Uriel. I thought Uriel would never forgive us. But Raphael—she’s always been the best with words.”

“Oh,” flirts a new voice, sauntering towards them out of the dark, “Come now, brother. We’re all quite eloquent when we put our minds to it.”

Alex has his hands on his gun and his gun in Gabriel’s face before the archangel can get one step closer. From the ground, Michael raises a hand and closes it around his calf.

“Peace. Gabriel means you no harm.”

“No?” Alex demands, not lowering his gun. Michael’s hand is a brand through the material of his pants. The touch is so incongruously comforting, so casually intimate. Gabriel dares a step closer, lifting his arms in surrender, expression mocking and cruel. There’s something off about it, though. Something not quite authentic. His eyes keep going down to where Michael’s hand is wrapped around Alex’s leg like there’s something there he’s not sure about, but he can’t figure out what it is.

“We now have a common enemy,” Gabriel points out, halting right in front of Alex and then offering an arm down to help Michael to his feet. “We want our father back, and Lucifer doesn’t. That makes us allies.”

“Speak for yourselves,” Alex spits out. He still hasn’t lowered his gun. With a sigh, Michael closes his hand around the barrel and pulls it away. Alex is reminded all in rush how weak he is compared to these two—compared to Noma, even. One firm shove and he’d crash backwards into the wall, probably break his spine in the process. Scowling, he allows Michael to take the gun.

“I’ve flown the perimeter,” Gabriel announces to Michael, “It’s looking good. I assume all those newly-human faces are around thanks to—”

“Alex evicted them all,” Michael confirms, not even looking at him, tapping the handle of the gun absently against his thigh. Alex is beginning to feel a trifle left out. “All at once. I met one on the way in—he was babbling about it. At the sheer power of it.”

“Yes,” Gabriel murmurs, cocking his head at Alex and surveying him like—like David Whele used to watch Sampson the lion. Proud and cruel and wistful.

“Okay, well, you can join my fan club later,” Alex butts in, feeling every inch the petulant child as they turn identical, surprised expressions on him, “If you’re really on our side you can help. We’ve got to get this city in order before something new hits us. Whether that’s Lucifer or if one of the dyads survived or just a bunch more 8-balls—whatever, there’ll be something angry coming for our blood.”

Gabriel examines him for a moment more, looking for some reason pleased. Then he inclines his head, gently mocking once more, and puts his fist over his heart.

“Whatever you command, my liege.”

 

 

 

**MICHAEL**

 

Alex has the chaos contained within hours. He barely needs Michael glowering over his shoulder to ensure that people listen. Instead he does what would never have occurred to Michael—he takes Claire’s death and he makes it something meaningful. He doesn’t make her a victim, a past lover gunned down by her own twisted father. Instead he makes her a martyr.

“Lady Riesen would be so proud of you,” he tells the crowd, gathered beneath the shattered rooftop he has claimed as a stage. “Of all of us. Look at this. We have the gates closed, the guns ready. Food has been distributed, the agri-towers stabilised. No matter what fresh hell comes out of the desert, we’re not going to meet it unprepared.”

A ragged cheer goes up. A few people are shouting Alex’s name. More are shouting Claire’s.

Michael watches from the washed-out shadows behind him. Alex’s blond hair gleaming in the flickering light, his arms raised like a conqueror. He’s wrecked and dirty and desolate, exhausted and hollowed out with grief. But he’s still there, standing tall as a king, his face fierce and unyielding. He’s not just _Alex_ anymore. He’s a blistering sun in a human body. Michael understands, suddenly, that the people on the ground below are not the only ones willing to follow this boy to whatever end he deems acceptable.

Over the next uncertain days, Michael circles Vega and watches unsteady shrines spring up on every corner. A thousand candles burning for Claire Riesen, who gave her life to defend the city that somehow still shelters them. Something inside Michael shifts painfully every time he spots a new one.

“They’re practically deifying her,” grumbles Gabriel when he returns from one of the many excursions Alex continues to send him on. Michael knows it is frustrating his twin to play the scout, but Alex is right. No human in this city is going to accept the archangel that spent twenty five years trying to slaughter them all. They’ve been lucky he’s not been detected so far.

“They take what hope they can,” he replies steadily, his tone disinterested. “If she gives them succour, let it be. What harm can it do?”

“They’re calling her the patron saint of Vega,” Gabriel grouses, throwing himself onto Michael’s bed, “A saint! What right do they have to select their saints?”

“If Father’s unhappy about it, he can come back and tell them,” Michael retorts tersely, his hands moving irritably from the hilts of his swords to the plans on the table before him.

Gabriel rolls his eyes. Michael doesn’t respond, but he smiles slightly to himself. Despite the desperation they face, it feels— _right_ , to have Gabriel back here, sulking and whining. Oh, he has missed his brother.

“You’re still blocking me out,” Gabriel complains, not lifting himself from the bed. “Aren’t we aligned now? Can’t we—”

“No,” Michael snaps. He doesn’t elaborate. Gabriel heaves a great, irritable sigh. They’ve entertained every variation of this argument over the past days. Gabriel, as ever, sees only the problem and its solution. An instantly fixable issue. Gabriel is fonder these days of easily-fixed problems than he has ever been before.

But there is too much blood between them for Michael to bear that closeness yet. Too much blood and too much shame. Michael is not ready for the conversation that will happen the second Gabriel uncovers his messy heart, twisted up in the shadow of Alex’s smile, the whispering memory of Noma bent and broken and bleeding from the place her wings used to be. He can’t shake the thought that keeps coming back to him: what would it feel like, to be a part of the love that ties those two together?

“I don’t understand what you’re so worried about,” Gabriel announces from the bed, kicking one heel idly against the floor, “I know what you’ve been up to already. These fragile humans—I can’t deny that even I’ve been tempted by them. They feel everything so _fiercely_. I’ll forgive you the trespass of bedding them. I’m sure Father will too. It’s just…curiosity.”

Michael watches his hands on the table in front of him. Without him feeling the intention they are balling slowly into fists.

“Curiosity,” he repeats, voice light. “Is that all you could imagine?”

Gabriel rears up to a sitting position suddenly. He’s idle, pushing the matter more for something to do than for any real feelings about it. It’s just _dull_ , all this sitting around and waiting for their enemies to make the next move. The plans are in place, the battle lines drawn. Alex can busy himself amongst the people, calming and inspiring and exhorting them to stay ready, but archangels are more a source of fear than of reassurance.

“What else is there?” he inquires indolently, rolling his shoulders and then his spine into a stretch, arching forwards, “The… _enjoyment_ to be gained is minimal compared to the risk. Unless you’ve decided to really throw in the towel and forget the risks. Sow your seeds, and all that. You’d make a great fath—”

Just to get him to shut up, Michael springs towards him, drags him bodily from the bed, and throws him out the window. Gabriel’s laughing when he flies back in. Michael is fully aware that his brother allowed him to manhandle him, but he feels better for it anyway.

“I’ve touched a nerve there, then,” Gabriel says gleefully, flinging himself back onto the bed. Michael rolls his eyes and lets his head fall back, pleading with his absent father for patience.

“What nerve?” demands a new voice. Gabriel sits up sharply, and Michael whips around to find Alex in the doorway, gazing between the pair of them with an inscrutable expression on his face.

“Why, my dear brother’s paternal instincts, of course,” Gabriel informs him cheerfully. Michael pulls out his sword, the nearest thing to hand, and throws it at him lengthwise. The hilt catches him in the elbow and then the weapon clatters to the ground. Gabriel is laughing openly, and even Alex looks amused as he comes further into the room.

“I’m not going to lie and say that I’ve got the strongest faith in them,” he says, his voice teasing, “But then, I can only speak from my own experience.”

Michael just glares at them both.

“Did you want something?” he demands of Alex, mostly to stop him looking at him like that—so challenging, so dangerously fond.

 “Yeah, it’s about the archangel corps,” he replies, instantly distracted, face growing serious once more. For the briefest and most hazardous moment, Michael longs for the teasing back.

 

 

**NOMA**

 

She watches them from high, high above. Circling carefully on an updraft, her wings ( _her wings, her wings, her wings_ ) catching the sunlight in ripples of pure light. They still distract her more than she dares admit. She catches the rush of white feathers from the corner of her eye and finds herself absorbed in the sight, running her hands over them, curling them before her to hide within their confines.

It was a small price to pay to get them back. The love of her long life for this? A downright bargain.

She tells herself this for the third time that day, preparing for the blind spot in the constant scanning of Vega—without Gates they’re so slow, so exposed, and they don’t even see it (could she warn them? Could she get herself caught to let them know they’ve got a chink in their armour?)—and then she steeples abruptly into a dive, flaring quick and low and close enough to make out the indistinct rustle of voices from Michael’s eyrie. She hasn’t the time to listen in on the conversation but all Lucifer wants is the bare bones, anyway. Enough to satiate his curiosity, prove to him that his spies are reporting back accurately. Michael and Gabriel and Alex, speaking together in an uneasy peace.

Noma got close to hating before, when she lived so close to so many humans. She feels the acidic spike of it again now, though she couldn’t tell who it’s aimed at. Michael, for being there with Alex? Alex, for being there with Michael? Gabriel, for being there with both of them and not understanding what a gift he has been given?  

Or Lucifer, architect of her deliverance and her agony? Yes, Lucifer, him most of all. He doesn’t need this information from her. He sends her only because he knows how it makes her ache.

With an angry roll, she hauls herself back into the thin air well above the city. She knows Michael is fascinated by the love that humans share with each other. She still wishes she had taken the time to tell him, that evening she’d caught him watching Alex with this revelatory expression on his face, that with the love comes the hate. And _hate_ —hate is such a poisonous thing.

She catches a good updraft and tries to enjoy the glide. The steady power of her wings, bone and muscle and feather flexing like a miracle. This is what an angel should be. Not pining over a _human_ , not spending secretive seconds taking the brush of Michael’s hands from her memory and turning them into quiet dreams—a wicked desperate fantasy where he’s reaching for her as a lover and not a leader, a general, Alex splayed beside her on silk sheets somewhere. Skin slick with sweat and their mouths moving against each other with easy, indolent certainty.

That is not what an angel is, Noma tells herself. Not that sinful wanting.

It takes her three days and nights of flight to make it back to Mallory, and the sight of it makes her skin crawl. She lands a little flushed, residual anger making her movements taut and jerky. In her weariness her mind will not stop straying to Alex and Michael and the two of them, set together by their inevitable hatred of her.

 _Peace_ , she reminds herself as she paces towards the church. _Grace_.

The Prophet looks her up and down and turns away with a disappointed sneer. Noma ignores him. She moves past him to the still pool, runs her eyes over the winged figure in the water.

“Report,” demands the Prophet from behind her. Noma feels the prickle of annoyance travel from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. But if she is nothing else she is a good soldier, always has been. So she squares her shoulders and tips her head back and does as she is commanded.

“The city’s weaknesses stand. They haven’t noticed them yet. Alex sent Gabriel to New Delphi, most likely to spy for him. He got back three days ago, not long before I left. They’re still not fighting, the three of them.”

The Prophet chuckles, still out of view over Noma’s shoulder. She resists the urge to turn and look at him. Whatever Lucifer knows about the two archangels and the Chosen One, he is only sharing it with The Prophet to provoke her. To make her recognise her place in this pecking order. She is no longer the most trusted lieutenant. She is the treacherous, desperate underling who sold everything to gain her wings back.

Her betrayal may have benefited Lucifer but he is as ruthless as their father in so many ways. She has betrayed and lied to those who loved her and Lucifer is punishing her for it, like he has the _right_. If it were Alex or Michael doing this to her she would prostrate herself at their feet and take it. But this?

She cannot stand him. She never thought she could miss something as simple as Michael’s straightforwardness. Punishment was quick, physical, an act of absolution.

She still remembers the first time she slept with Alex. She’d gone to Michael afterwards and confessed, head bowed, hair still wet from the showers. He had closed his hand so tightly around the hilt of his sword that his knuckles had gone white.

“Noma,” he had said, dragging her name out in the airy stillness of his eyrie, “That is not what you were supposed to do.”

She had lifted her chin, confidence high, blood still racing, and stared right across the room at him.

“You said stay close. That’s what I’m doing.”

He’d said nothing more. She had expected the lash, seen it administered to a dozen of her fellow soldiers—watched him do it to Alex the first time, his face carefully set, the heartbeat only she could hear picking up with every wince and gasp of pain from the Chosen One. Instead she was put on the dog shift at Whele Tower, forced to endure the infuriating stream of arrogance that flowed from David Whele’s lips from the moment he rose at five in the morning until she was relieved at two.

She’d asked him about it, more than three years later.

“Whips are not for our kind,” he’d told her, barely even looking her way, his attention mostly held by the screen on the wall that showed a jeep—containing Alex, Noma was quite sure—racing back towards the city with an 8-ball in pursuit. “I’d never demean you that way.”

“But you’d demean Alex that way,” she’d said then, surprising even herself with her boldness. “You’ll do it again today.” There was a note of challenge in her tone. It was enough to make him twist his head and look at her, gaze cool and removed.

“What’s your point, soldier?”

“No point, archangel,” she’d replied. She’d said it with enough barb to let him know that there _was_ a point, and it swam somewhere in the way he looked at Alex when he forgot to guard himself.

They had stared each other down for a moment or two. Michael’s expression had not changed a millimetre. If Noma had not spent so much of her courage on that first spiked comment she might have found herself smirking, just slightly—just enough to let him know that he could fool himself all he wanted, but that she saw that singular truth under his surface.

His face had been as still as ever when he turned back to the screen, and Noma had stepped up to stand at his shoulder and watch with him.

They had not said a word, and Noma feels like something important was lost in those silent moments stood shoulder-to-shoulder. If she wasn’t a traitor, a coward, at heart, she would have dared to ask why he could forgive her love of Alex and not his own.

In Mallory, Noma plants herself in the earth and knots her hands into each other behind her back. Her love he could forgive. She is under no illusions that her betrayal will be received similarly. This is all she has now—an infuriating human prophet and a vengeful archangel clawing back towards the light. Best she shuts her heart away and focuses on what is immediately before her instead of dwelling on fantasies. Healthier all around.

 

 

**ALEX**

 

Of course when the shit hits the proverbial fan, it all hits at once. Alex has no clue why he expected anything else.

The first set of news comes from a panicked new soldier recruit, bursting into the co-opted council room and skidding to a halt before the circle of arguing leaders.

“8-balls!” he gasps out, too exhausted to be intimidated by the city’s most famous faces turning to stare at him in astonishment, “There’s a whole army of 8-balls out by the southern wall. The guy in charge—it’s a dyad, it looks like. Someone said he’s Julian, but he’s dead, isn’t he? He’s _dead_.”

The soldier sounds like he’s begging more than stating.

Into the silence that greets this proclamation comes the sound of boots ringing against the marble floor. Everybody turns as if hypnotised to watch Michael stride in, his twin at his shoulder. Behind Alex, somebody whispers, “ _Gabriel_?!” in horrified fascination.

“Lucifer has made his move,” Michael announces calmly. The shake in his hands is perceptible only to Alex, and then only because he is looking for it. He is holding a severed human head—a woman, dark and lovely, her hair silky in Michael’s white grip. “Mallory is captured. For every day that we fail to turn the Chosen One over to him, he will kill another citizen. There will be three more dead already. We couldn’t fly fast enough.”

There’s a beat, a moment of absolute silence when it is clear that whatever he is supposed to say next is not something he can bring himself to utter.

That’s when Gabriel steps forward, fixes his gaze on Alex, and says, “Noma dies on the twentieth day.”

Alex feels the air rush out of him like he’s been punched. Whatever his face looks like, it’s enough to stir Michael back into action.

He marches forwards and the crowd parts like water to let him through. With an unexpected care, he places the head on the table. Some of the people make faces of disgust, quiet noises rising up from where they jerk backwards.

“Her name was Laurel,” Michael tells them. That narrow blue stare finds Alex, and he isn’t sure why there’s an apology in it. “I knew her. She was…important to me. That’s why she was the first.”

There is another weighted silence. Alex, for what must be the thousandth time, misses Claire with a fierceness that leaves him breathless. She would already be speaking. She would have a hundred words in the air already, reassuring and inspiring and instructing them. What good is he without her?

“May _I_ suggest—” begins Gabriel from the shadows at the side of the room. His voice is swallowed by a great tumult of shouts, the people in the room turning with the most predictable, _human_ spite possible on the easiest evil to identify. Accusing cries, distressed jibes, they swim and tangle around each other as the various inhabitants of the room rail against the archangel who sought to exterminate them for a quarter of a century.

Alex wants to stop them but he can’t take his eyes off Michael. The archangel has propped both hands on the table on either side of Laurel’s head and his shoulders have buckled beneath some great weight. He is still looking at Alex, looking at him with something defenceless and exhausted in his gaze. He feels the heaviness all the way down in his stomach.

“Alright!” he yells into the clamour, eliminating the noise in a heartbeat. So new and uncertain, this power of his. They turn without hesitation, without rebuke. Will he ever be used to it?

He organises them in bitten-off, efficient orders. Most to the walls and their posts, to guard the control room—Vega will never make that mistake again—and Gabriel down to the foot soldiers at the gates, ready to be the first line of defence.

“This is the best way for him to prove himself,” Alex points out when the cries of outrage go up, “If he turns on us you’ll be in the best possible position to put him down.”

He fixes a stare of unyielding iron on Gabriel. The archangel is grinning like a panther snarls, teeth bright white, danger in every line of his face.

“What faith you have in me, commander.”

“If you betray us, I will kill you myself,” he warns him in a low and venomous tone. Gabriel’s grin just widens.

“You forget—Julian tortured me and my brother both. I want his head just as much as you do.”

And with that, he turns on his heel and strides out of the room, not waiting for the soldiers to catch up with him.

“Michael and I will go to Alabama,” Alex says into the silence that lingers after Gabriel’s departure. A cacophony of protest rises, but Alex silences it all with a raised hand. Nobody but he can see that the forearm it is attached to now bears the reassuring command, ‘WHAT YOU WANT IS WAITING IN MALLORY’.

Alex, who has long been a great believer in the phrase ‘be careful what you wish for’, isn’t really sure that he’s up for finding out what it is God thinks he wants. If it’s something that will do him good. For all he knows there’s some subconscious part of him that wants Lucifer to rise and kill them all. After all, it had taken long months before it occurred to him that maybe he looked at Michael a little more the way he looked at Claire than the way he looked at other superior officers. Introspection has never been his forte.

It takes him another hour to talk the rest of the room round—an hour in which he is blisteringly aware every second of Michael sat in the corner, cradling Laurel’s head in bloodied hands, his eyes fixed unnervingly on Alex. What he is thinking, Alex cannot even begin to guess. He hasn’t felt this uncertain of him in a long time.

Michael wants to fly. He’s jittery and irritable with it, anger and helplessness in every long line of his body. Alex protests, pointing out how tiring it will be for Michael to carry him all that way—five days flight, even with an archangel’s supernatural strength. There’s no way they can fly through the night as well. Not to mention how uncomfortable. It’s one thing to be grabbed in a marketplace and manhandled like a dead body, but to readily step into Michael’s embrace and press himself against him, every trembling inch touching, for hours upon end? Alex is not prepared for that.

Michael barely says a word, even once he and Alex are sat in a jeep, the back full of supplies and weapons, a few drawn faces watching them pull away from Vega’s walls while the sounds of battle being joined arise in the distance.

“It’s fine,” Alex says to him, glancing over to the passenger side, “Lucifer can see much further than just Mallory, can’t he? His network of spies and all that. He’ll know I’ve decided to come. He’ll stop killing them. We’ll be there days before—you know, before he gets to Noma.”

Michael just looks away; fixes his gaze on the baked-brown horizon. Alex’s eyes find themselves wandering down, noticing the newly clean skin on the archangel’s hands before he returns his stare to the road. He’d buried Laurel’s head outside the walls while Alex fought the other leaders of Vega and had the jeep made ready. Alex doesn’t think he will ever have the courage to ask what the woman meant to him, how he decided to honour her at her burial site. Why he carried her head for three days and nights flight and didn’t stop even to wash the blood off his hands. That seems too personal, even with this new uncertain bond that stretches between them.

The silence stretches hours. Alex is beginning to think Michael is never going to speak to him again. The road before them just keeps rolling forwards, arrowing straight towards the point where it disappears in a haze of heat.

“Nature calls,” he says abruptly, four hours in, braking sharply enough to throw them both forward—noting Michael’s annoyed expression with some satisfaction—and hopping out of the car, circling round the back to piss into the dirt.

He gives himself a few moments in the open air, rolling his shoulders back and tilting his head to the endless blue sky. He had forgotten, amongst all the responsibility and decisions and city problems to fix, how much he loves being out here in the quiet. Only him and his immediate task, simple and straightforward.

Well, mostly, anyhow, he thinks to himself as he climbs back in and finds Michael in the passenger seat waiting. At least the archangel has turned to look at him now. Small victories.

They are moving for another ten minutes before Michael finally says something.

“She was in charge when I got there. Laurel, I mean. She was…kind to me. Some of the townsfolk wanted to cast me out, and she fought my corner.”

Michael’s voice is carefully light, his hands deliberately still upon his thighs. If Alex was feeling less uncertain of what seems to snap between them suddenly, like a flag in too-strong a wind, he would make a jibe about the archangel’s too-perfect poise. It’s far too stiff to be natural, even for Michael.

“You loved her?” he guesses, glancing over quickly. He’s a little teasing. Just enough to give them a way back to normality, if Michael chooses to take it.

Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t.

“Loved?” he repeats, eyebrows rising in disbelief, “No. Admired, respected, yes. She was strong, and she was willing to die for her town. I—strength like that always intrigues me.”

Alex finds himself halfway to asking if that is what had drawn him to Becca Thorne but he bites his own tongue on the question just in time. Candour like this is so rare. He doesn’t want to do anything to jeopardise it.

“You slept with her, though,” he says instead, his tone still light. It doesn’t hurt him to ask—whatever it is that he feels inside himself pulling towards Michael, it never seems to provoke pain. He’s an archangel, after all. Alex has no delusions that he might find his small, curious feelings reflected back. He’s been at peace with that since he first realised what they were.

“Yes I did,” Michael replies, his head falling back against his seat. He’s washed out by regret; wrecked with it.

“That’s not why she died, Michael. This was Lucifer. This was not you.”

“It was,” comes the distant, deadened retort. “He picked her to die first because she had feelings for me, and I let them interest me enough to take her to bed. Let _her_ interest me enough. After Becca, I should have—”

He cuts himself off briskly, turns his face back to the horizon again. Alex feels his hands tightening of their own accord on the steering wheel.

“Is that the only reason you do it? Sleep with them? Because they _interest_ you?” He’s not sure why his voice sounds so determinedly light. He doesn’t dare look at Michael. The archangel’s gaze has swung around to pin him with its unnerving laser-focus. _Damn_. He’d hoped the tone of accusation wouldn’t shine through.

“Angels can’t love, Alex.” His voice is so deep. Alex wants to climb down his throat and get at the oceans inside of him. His knuckles turn white on the wheel.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“It’s what you meant.”

Michael’s voice has found that fatherly note—the one he uses to explain things to Alex that he feels should be obvious, the tone of the patient educator. Alex has resented it on and off, but today it feels like sandpaper in his ears.

“Don’t patronise me. I’m not your goddamn pupil.”

Michael presses his head back and heaves a sigh, blowing the breath out hard through his nose and mouth. He’s frustrated, residual anger from Laurel’s fate getting caught up in Alex’s unexpected insolence. Alex knows he shouldn’t push but he can’t help it. So he sits and waits, trying his best to radiate irritation.

“Fine, yes, they interest me so I sleep with them. But it’s not—there’s more than that. It’s…” he trails off. Alex glances over, eyebrows raised, carefully insouciant. Michael isn’t even looking at him. He’s staring straight ahead, brows furrowed, considering how he means to answer next.

His gaze snaps sideways suddenly, still framed with a frown, and meets Alex’s eyes. “The whole idea of sex and intimacy, it always fascinated me, even before I came down here. Lived among you. The _humanity_ of it, the messiness and simplicity and the way you give yourselves over to it. Humans having sex—the world could stop and they wouldn’t notice until it was over. I couldn’t stop thinking about that. The abandon of it.”

Alex jerks his eyes back to the road. He regrets picking the fight, he regrets starting the conversation, he regrets that he ever bothered to look at Michael and see something more than a fearsome figure towering over him. The front of this jeep is too contained a space to be having this discussion.

“You ever achieve that, then?” he inquires. His mouth is dry as the desert. He doesn’t dare look at the archangel. Somehow, from somewhere, he’s found a casual tone. His spine is straight as a rod against the seat, his shoulders nearly trembling with the effort to stay relaxed.

Michael blows out a chuckle. “No. It’s enjoyable, but nothing more. And you all tire so quickly.”

Alex seizes the mocking comment that presents in his head and replies without thought, desperate to divert the conversation, “Well, Noma never seemed to have your problem. Maybe you’re just doing it with the wrong people.”

“Maybe,” Michael replies thoughtfully. Alex gets the feeling suddenly that he is not the only one carefully keeping their eyes on the road to prevent them from straying sideways.

“Anyway,” he says, too loudly, “Like I said, Laurel’s not your fault. Hell, if anybody’s seeing past lovers punished, it’s me. Claire dead, Noma turned traitor? Maybe the universe is trying to warn me against romantic entanglements.”

He risks a glance sideways and finds Michael pulling his mouth back in a slight smile, quietly amused. He doesn’t say anything in response, though, and Alex can’t think of an obvious way to continue the conversation. Silence reclaims the car. This time, Alex feels the tension less like a weight. This might not be too bad, after all, this journey. At least if he’s going to die at the end of it, he won’t have wasted his last days alive stuck in a jeep with a silent, resentful archangel.

 

 

**MICHAEL**

 

They camp out every night in abandoned buildings, taking it in turns to snatch a few hours of sleep while the other keeps watch.

For six nights Michael doesn’t bother trying to resist the urge to sit and watch Alex sleep. They don’t dare light a fire in case they attract the wrong sort of attention, but the nights have been clear enough that he could examine every inch of skin by the light of the moon. And why should he not? They’ll probably both be dead in days. Why shouldn’t he snatch these last shameful moments of pleasure?

On the seventh night, he can’t bear to look.

Has Alex been so blisteringly aware of his body, so close, separated only by the stick? Has he had to snap his teeth onto his tongue to stop anything other than the right answer coming out? Seven days so close—maybe the last week he’ll get. Is he a hero or a coward for not doing anything about that distance?

Michael clears his head roughly of the thoughts, fixing his gaze on the horizon to stop it straying downwards. This is getting absurd. He’s watched this boy grow—held him in his arms as a screaming child, shadowed him on the streets, been the one observer Alex has never been able to shake. He is protector and father-figure and _angel_. Alex will never—should never—look at him any differently.

The softest of sighs drifts over from the Chosen One’s sleeping form, and Michael’s eyes are there before he realises it. And— _oh_ , he thinks. One arm flung over his eyes, the hard line of his jaw catching the moonlight, golden stubble there rough and shining. He’s a work of art, all the beauty of Da Vinci’s _Virgin of the Rocks_ angel stepped right out of its painting.

Before Alex Lannon, Michael never understood the concept of the sublime. He was it, after all, him and his father and his siblings. The human hunger to experience it never touched him. How could it? But now he feels the fiery rush of need through his body, feels his mouth part and his skin all but burn with it. Something—something _heavenly_. Something so much bigger than him.

Alex’s arm falls and his eyes blink open, narrowing as they are greeted with the star-filled sky above. His head turns, sleep all over him, and he yawns at Michael without bothering to cover his mouth.

“Dawn yet?” he mumbles, barely awake. Michael digs his nails into his palms and manages a shake of his head.

“Thank God,” Alex replies and rolls over, asleep again in bare seconds.

Michael wants to scream. He wants to whip out his wings, leap out through the long-gone roof and take to the sky and fly and fly and fly until Alex Lannon is a dot behind him and this needy pathetic _wanting_ is carved out of his system.

Instead he turns his gaze back to the empty plain outside the shattered window. He will do his duty. He always does.

The next time Alex wakes dawn has broached the horizon and Michael is already at the jeep. He’s checking their gear hasn’t shifted, but only to have something to do with his hands. Alex is still full of sleep, his hands clumsy as he pulls on his boots and rolls up his sleeping bag. He keeps scrubbing his arm across his eyes like it’ll wake him up better.

Michael goes to pick up their cooking stuff and ends up grabbing Alex’s sleeping bag off him too just to speed things up. The man is staring at it like he’s not quite connecting what to do with it next.

“Sorry,” Alex says tiredly as he shuffles behind Michael to the car, “Bad dreams, you know. Kept waking up.”

“I saw,” is the only reply Michael gives. In the time it takes Alex to pull his door open and haul himself inside, Michael has everything tucked neatly away and himself inserted in the passenger seat.

There’s a silence while Alex fumbles for the keys, and Michael has just opened his mouth to offer to drive when Alex cuts across him, butting in before he can even speak.

“I can do it,” he says tersely, finally getting the engine to cough to life, “It’s a straight fucking road, you know? Not exactly a challenge.”

Michael raises both eyebrows.

“Oh, piss off,” Alex retorts, tanned hands tight on the steering wheel as he slams the jeep to seventy kilometres an hour as fast as he possibly can, sending them both back hard against their seats.

“If you’re tired, I just wanted to help,” Michael informs him in his best placatory tone. He’s struggling not to smile. So many years in the archangel corps made a soldier of Alex, up at the slightest sign of danger and alert no matter how few hours of sleep he got. But Michael still remembers the stories Jeep told, of how he’d have to physically haul Alex out of bed as a kid to get him up much before midday and then watch him cruise around like a dead thing, unable to shake the tiredness out.

Michael’s never seen it before. But now, with so many nights broken sleep and lost sleep altogether, with all the stress and grief—Alex has lost all that instant-alertness. And Michael… _likes_ him like this, he realises. Not even in the sense that it makes his body more desperate to get close than ever but in the sense that he wants to wake up to Alex like this more than one rare time. He wants to watch him fumble around in the mornings, reaching for coffee they don’t have and blinking too much, sleep in his eyes. He’s softer, vulnerable, loose-limbed as a puppy.

Michael lets his head fall back against the headrest and very deliberately keeps his eyes fixed on the road ahead. Beside him, Alex yawns again and then contorts himself in the driver’s seat to stretch out his spine. Michael is definitely _not_ looking, but he sees a grimace creep across Alex’s face that gets more and more intense until there’s an audible _click_ , something settling back into place, and Alex relaxes with satiated attitude of a very happy cat.

It is slowly dawning on Michael what Noma had meant when she’d come to him years ago, hands splayed wide and helpless, and said, “It’s their fragility, archangel. The way they put themselves in so much danger without even thinking about how weak they are. Alex, he just charges in even though someone like us could snap him in two without having to try that hard. I—I can’t help it. I envy it so much. I envy it and I love it.”

He could break Alex Lannon apart with a single blow.

That shouldn’t make him want to pull him within the hot confines of his wings and never let him out.

“We’ll make Mallory today, right?” Alex asks, pulling him out of his thoughts. Michael frowns, considering how far they’ve come. Allowing for the slowness of travelling by road, he thinks they probably will. Make it by midday, even. Alex drives so determinedly fast.

“Yes,” he replies, a little abstracted, narrowing his eyes over at a rock formation speeding towards them. The unusual shape of it has his mind prodding at him, reminding him of an afternoon on the beach, his wings in the water, the sun on his back—the wind in his hair had felt like his father’s hands. He’d been so at peace before the human disturbed him.

“Take this exit,” he says suddenly, pointing ahead of them to where a dusty stretch of tarmac diverges abruptly from the main road. It snakes off into the distance, sloping gently down towards what Michael knows is the ocean. Alex shoots him a suspicious look but does as bid without even a word of protest. Miracles, it turns out, do still exist.

He cajoles Alex out of the car and onto the sand simply by walking off and pretending he doesn’t care if he follows or not. Alex hesitates, then swears under his breath and follows Michael down. He’s so wonderfully predictable, so desperately easy to provoke. He’s holding his gun tightly, eyes trying to be everywhere at once, sand indubitably trickling into his boots already.

“What is this, a field trip?” he calls over the sound of the sea, sounding immensely put out.

“I was here right before I found Mallory,” Michael informs him, not acknowledging his annoyance, tipping his head back to let the Alabama sun wash over his face. He hadn’t misremembered the peacefulness here. The crash of waves, the baked-hot sand, the taste of salt already clinging to his lips. He licks them, the sharp burst like a kiss on his tongue.

When he looks back, Alex is staring at him, shading his eyes beneath his hand. For once he is inscrutable.

“What?” Michael inquires, lazily provocative.

He knows Mallory is waiting—Mallory and Noma and _Lucifer_. The townsfolk are crying out for a saviour. For them. Gabriel is probably in the sky arrowing towards them right now, teeth gritted with the determination to catch up with them before they arrive.

They might die today. It feels so much more likely than any other dangerous day so far, and there have been enough of those. Michael can all but taste it—like the sweet smell of rot or the dustiness of forgotten tombs. It’s sat on his tongue with the salt.

He should be forcing them onwards, dragging Alex towards their shared fate without a backwards glance. But—and here’s the thing, the thing it’s all been building towards—he doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to hand this man over to his murdered older brother and it isn’t because of what Alex has the potential to represent. Not because Alex Lannon bears those heavenly markings but because Alex Lannon is Alex Lannon, and he matters so very much to Michael.

Alex is still staring. His eyes have narrowed beneath his hand, his expression taut and wary. Michael is waiting for something, though he doesn’t know what. Alex to tell him to fuck off or Alex to beckon him forwards. He would go, he knows. He’d probably go on his knees if Alex asked, pride and dignity be damned.

But Alex doesn’t ask. Instead he coughs out a laugh and says, “God, of all the weird things you could have done today.”

Michael grins, slow as a slithering snake. And then he just shrugs, rolling his shoulders back, and turns towards the sea.

They stay on the beach for what could be hours. Michael can feel Alex’s gaze boring into his back but he doesn’t take his eyes from the ocean. If these are the last hours of his life on Earth he wants it to be like this. Alex at his back and the whole sea before him, bristling and blue.  The only other thing he’d want is Noma’s steady presence too, no betrayal and no anger. Just the three of them and the ocean.

Something like grace.

 

 

**NOMA**

 

Lucifer’s spies are everywhere. Noma knows this, knows it intimately. Has been one of those spies often enough lately.

But it hasn’t been drilled into her quite as effectively as it might have been until today. Until a man rode a sweating horse into the centre of Mallory, laughed outright at the townsfolk cringing in their doorways, and swept his hat from his head.

“They are but thirty minutes away, my lord!” he’d announced to the town at large.

Noma still isn’t quite sure what happened next. There was a chuckle and a thud from behind her, and then they knocked her out cold, face down into the dust. This last part she knows because she woke up with it caked yellow down her front.

Lucifer’s plan is not hard to deduce.

He’s strung her up in a wooden-slat box, had his followers pin it to the sloping church roof like a mockery of a bird cage. Her wings have been forced out and pinned to the sides of it roughly. Every time she moves it feels like she’s losing them again.

She’s pushing the pain away, for now, huddling it down inside her like a cringing dog. The pain is nothing. Much worse is the realisation that she is to be the bait for whatever trap has been set.

The whole town is watching the road. There’s dust in the distance, and as they crane towards it the low buzz of an engine drifts towards them.

She wants to scream her throat raw, tear her voice box to shreds. She wants to throw herself out of this damned thing and fly to Alex, grab him and drag him far, far away from here.

But she’s caught like a moth against a window, bloodied and helpless, a filthy rag bound around her mouth and pressing against her tongue. So she just curls up as far as she can, her wings pulling agonisingly at the pins, and waits for everything she loves to die.

The car doesn’t take long enough to nose into the centre of Mallory, rolling to a stop beside the dying fire. Alex steps out cautiously, gun tight in his hands. Noma heaves a sob when she sees Michael get out too—maybe there is a chance now. Maybe, maybe, maybe. She hadn’t at all trusted that Alex wouldn’t get it into his head to come alone, charge in here like the heroic fool he is.

They’ve seen her, she knows. Alex keeps darting glances up at her cage, nailed crudely to the roof like a warning. She wants to tell him not to look, to keep focused, that the Morning Star’s prophets are in every hidden corner just waiting for the signal to pounce. But she’s useless, voiceless.

They confer briskly, one dark head and one golden pressed together for short and biting seconds. Noma’s eyes are wide, trying to take in everything at once. Maybe if she spots where the attack will be led from she can somehow scream around the gag, make them _see_ —

She lets out a moan of terror as Michael’s wings flare out and he launches himself into the air. How can he? How can he leave Alex down there? Panic turns her vision white at the edges. She’s a soldier, she’s got nerves of steel, but this is all too much. This is _too much_.

Michael makes short work of the cage. He rips the front off like it’s nothing, splintered wood crashing down against the slope of the church roof and pattering around Alex below. Noma cringes away, fear all over her like a disease. There is the briefest of pauses as Michael takes in the bloodied spread of her wings, the bruises on her face, the pleading terror in her eyes.

Below, there’s a staccato burst of gunfire.

Michael’s mouth twists and he reaches in, ripping the pins out with no attempt to do it gently. Noma really does scream now, voice hoarse and muffled by the cloth. Michael grabs her with little finesse, hauling her out of the cage by the front of her thin vest. His knuckles press sharply between her breasts, blunt points of pain against her sternum.

“Can you fly?” he demands when he has her balanced halfway between his chest and the shaking, tilting cage. Still gagged, she only has to twitch her wings to know the answer. She shakes her head, and something in Michael’s expression hardens.

“For what you’ve done I should let you fall,” he tells her softly. But then he pulls her from the cage completely and tugs them both into the air. By the time they land again, Alex has dispatched the four men that rushed at him and has his gun trained on an approaching figure. He doesn’t take his eyes away to acknowledge Noma.

As Michael rips the bindings off her wrists, Noma has to use everything she’s got just to stay standing. The second her hands are free she pulls the gag from her mouth, her words running away with her.

“Please,” she begs, “Please, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. My wings, you know? My wings—”

“Quiet,” Michael orders tersely. He’s turned to watch behind them, his swords already in his hands. “You’re useless to us like this. Go to the jeep, lock the doors, heal your wings. The second you are well enough you come back out and you fight.” He hesitates for a second, then something in his expression hardens further and he adds, “If you help us win today I will consider all debts paid.”

Noma’s breath leaves her in a heady, disbelieving gasp. Michael takes his eyes off Lucifer’s acolyte, marching ever closer, and shoots her the most numbing of glares.

“You will not be forgiven, Noma. Not by me. All I promise is that no punishment will come from my hand.”

Noma doesn’t dare look at Alex. Will he forgive? Or will it be his beloved hands that enact vengeance on her? She doesn’t know which would destroy her quickest. Vision blurred by tears, blood still trickling down the feathers of her wings, she stumbles away towards the jeep.

As the sound of fighting is joined outside she scrabbles for a lighter, burns a wing feather away to ash. Her hands shake as she dusts it over her wounds, every nerve wired. _Quicker, quicker_ , she tells herself, feeling the itchy burn of skin knitting back together.

Finally, after an age, she can grab a gun off the back seat and fling the door open and begin to fight her way through Lucifer’s acolytes—people she has lived among these past wretched weeks—and back to Alex’s side. Alex’s and Michael’s.

But she’s halted by momentary confusion. Three swords gleam around Alex, three sets of arching black-brown wings sweeping bullets and knives away from him. She hears Michael shout a name over the furore, watches incredulously as Raphael—Raphael!—whips around and dodges a spinning knife, slashing the tips of her wings across an acolyte’s throat without breaking her rhythm. Raphael, the oldest and the most withdrawn. The one whose absence had driven Michael closest to despair in those desperate early days of war when she’d refused to even speak to them.

And now she’s here, blonde hair shining, cheeks bloodied, her expression fearsome and focused as she cuts through human bodies like water.

Noma is drawn towards the four of them as if she’s in a dream. _How can you hope to fight them_ , she wants to demand of the followers still rushing at the trio of archangels, ringing Alex like a protective barrier, _How could anybody come up against that and live?_

“No, Noma!” Alex yells at her as she raises the gun to begin taking aim, to fight to their sides. She hesitates, meets his eyes through the mess and blood and death. “The townsfolk! You have to get them out!”

She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t care about these people—she doesn’t care about anybody except Alex now, trapped there in the melee, firing so methodically through openings in bullet-proof wings.

But there are screams starting to go up in buildings, screams of children. Noma’s heart throws itself into her throat as she realises a terrible thing. _The fire has gone out_. She’s off and running before the realisation has finished itself. 8-balls are already creeping in, wicked and hungry. She guns down a stray follower of Lucifer as she goes and makes it to a barn, pulling back the doors and shouting over the shrieks and yells that greet her.

“If you want to live,” she cries out, “Follow me.”

They’re a mess, pushing and shoving and wailing, but they carry their young and their sick and pull their friends out of houses they’re too afraid to leave and somehow Noma gets them all across the square, the acolytes too busy with Alex and his three archangels to pay them any attention at all.

Ignoring the fact that Lucifer is right behind them, waiting and watching, Noma huddles them all out of town, driving them to an abandoned storm drain she discovered in one of her lonely days here. Most of them have started praying. Noma wants to scream. God is gone—she knows that better than almost anyone. There’s nobody left to pray to. You make your own grace, take blessings instead of waiting for them to be given.

Today, she will do that. She will survive this, and she will pull Alex through.

Not Michael. Michael can pull himself.

Taking a deep breath, rooting herself between the outside world and all these fragile humans, Noma raises her gun to her shoulder and prepares to fight.

 

 

**ALEX**

 

He wakes on white sheets. Remembered adrenaline has him surging to sit up and he almost makes it before a pair of beautiful, bloodied hands press against his chest and force him back down.

“Steady,” comes Michael’s voice, hoarse and tired, “You lost a lot of blood.”

Alex blinks three, four times before anything swims into focus. Michael is leaning over him, concern etched into every line on his face. He still has blood spattered across his cheeks, his mouth. Alex wants to kiss it away in a way he’s never wanted to before.

“Shit,” he grinds out, “How much morphine have you given me?”

Michael blows out a laugh, pulls his hands away, sits back.

“It was Noma,” he confesses, gesturing somewhere behind Alex, “She all but held the doctor hostage. There was plenty of it, anyway. You know she kept them all safe? All of them. Not a single townsperson died today. I’ve never seen any angel but us fight like that.”

Alex frowns up at the wooden ceiling, arching high above his head.

“What happened? I don’t remember—last thing was your sister getting pulled away and then they grabbed me and knocked me out cold. I thought I heard you say something, but…there was shouting. Did everyone—are they okay? Your siblings?”

He turns his head to look at Michael. The archangel has his gaze fixed somewhere in the middle distance, and he looks so desperately _tired_.

“Gabriel’s fine,” he replies after a long, long silence. “Gabriel’s always fine. He’s gone back to Vega to check on them. They survived the assault, obviously. He came straight to tell us but—well, we were already fighting, you know that already. And Raphael…” he trails off for a minute. Alex can’t tell if it’s because he doesn’t know what to say or because what he has to say is painful to voice. Finally, he speaks up again, “Raphael’s not fine. Every part of her is mourning Uriel. But she survived the attack—she’s the one who dealt the killing blow to Lucifer. He was halfway out of the water when we made it into the crypt, using your blood to claw his way back to life. I’ve never seen Raphael move so fast. She took his head clean off.”

Alex heaves a sigh of relief. He’d assumed, given the fact he’s woken up at all, that Lucifer did not succeed in draining him of blood. Raphael had barely had the time to explain the ritual when she’d landed, a ferocious mass of golden hair and burning grief. How Lucifer would have Alex taken to him, his wrists cut over the water and his blood drained out slowly and painfully. How his death would give Lucifer his life.

“I healed your wrists,” Michael says suddenly, reaching for Alex’s forearm before seeming to think better of it. So Alex lifts it himself, examining the skin there—unmarked beneath the tattoos. Something niggles at him as he looks at the markings, but he can’t quite figure it out.

“Thanks,” he replies. There seems to be little else to say.

A silence stretches between them. Alex is about to break it, to just say _something_. Something that doesn’t matter but that will dispel the thickness that lies in the air between them—distract them from the broken way Michael had screamed Alex’s name as he took the blow to the back of his head, from the look on the archangel’s face as Lucifer’s followers dragged his fading form away into the church.

“He’s awake,” gasps a voice from the space behind Michael, and before Alex can say anything Noma is there, pushing past Michael and going to her knees beside his bed. She’s still hazy with tears, face caught between delight and despair. She doesn’t touch him, though he can see her hands itching to. His gaze goes past her. Michael is watching them both, eyes narrowed, something wistful in his expression.

Alex can’t bear to keep looking.

“Hey, Nomes,” he murmurs, lifting a heavy hand to brush at her wet cheeks with the back of his fingers, “Heard you did a pretty good job today.”

She grasps at his hand, presses it against her face.

“I’m so sorry, Alex,” she moans, fresh tears spilling over, “He promised me, he promised me my wings back. I couldn’t—I love you, but my _wings_. I couldn’t, I wasn’t—”

“Hey, hey,” Alex interrupts softly, flicking gently at her cheek to recapture her attention, “You know what this says?”

He lifts his other forearm, gestures to the markings there. Noma and Michael both stare at them, expressions full of concentration like somehow they might be able to read them this time. Like suddenly they’ll have that power.

“It says, ‘forgive’,” Alex whispers. Noma lets out a breathless sob. But Alex’s eyes have found Michael’s again, and the archangel has reluctance written all over him.

Michael tells him, “I never told you, but she betrayed you once before.” He sounds sorry to be saying it, which is something. Closing her eyes, Noma presses her face into the side of Alex’s mattress. She’s still holding his fingers against her face.

“She listened to Gabriel, of all people, when Father first disappeared. He sent her to find you, to kill you, to—”

“Enough,” Alex cuts in, pinning Michael with his gaze. “I was a baby. How could she know then? How many babies have you killed on your father’s orders? All our hands are bloody,” he adds, pulling his fingers away and slipping them into Noma’s hair, cradling her head as she draws it back in disbelief, “We’re all carrying so many lives. Who’ll forgive us if not each other?”

Noma looks and looks at him. And then she turns, suddenly, and fixes her eyes on Michael. Alex lets his hand fall.

“You think you stand outside us,” she tells him, her voice sure in a way Alex hasn’t heard it since well before she lost her wings, “You think that this, us—that it excludes you. But how could it? All that we’ve been through together, all the things we don’t say to each other. You’re a part of this, as much as we are.”

She turns back to Alex, wild with some revelation, pushing off her knees and towering over them both suddenly—Alex still flat on his back, Michael in his chair—and she exclaims, “It’s just stupid! It’s stupid. The world ended, you know? And we came through it. The three of us, together. Always us. We beat Gabriel and we beat Julian and we—now we killed Lucifer and saved everybody here and none of us even has the courage to _say_ it.”

Michael is frowning up at her. He looks as confused as Alex feels. But then Alex’s eyes drop to his own arm, to the words still there that insist that what he wants is waiting in Mallory. Still there. Not vanished with Lucifer’s destruction.

He feels something swell in his stomach, something that must show on his face. Noma beams down at him, beatific. Even here, now, his breath catches all over again. The luminosity of her eyes, the fierce set of her jaw. And Michael, behind her, wearing blood like most people would wear expensive jewels, lean and dangerous as a tiger.

Noma leans down, gentle as a sigh, and ghosts a kiss over Alex’s mouth. When she pulls back, he quirks his lips upwards in the tiniest smile. She returns it, something bold abruptly flaring in her face, and then she turns around and presses her mouth against Michael’s too.

He rocks backwards in his chair. Alex watches his hands fasten around the arms of his chair, sees the knuckles press up white beneath the skin. When Noma leans away his pupils are blown wide, every line of his face worried and wondering at the same time.

Not giving himself time to think, buoyed up by Noma’s bravery, Alex pushes himself up in bed leans over and kisses Michael too. It feels—foreign. New. Sublime. The archangel’s mouth is stiff against his, his unyielding chest so warm under Alex’s tentative touch.

Michael draws away first. All but cringes back, his lungs going like a set of bellows, his mouth cracked open and pink.

“We _can’t_ ,” he tells them, trying so hard for firmness, “This is not—Alex is half-crazed with morphine, and we don’t even know what Lucifer’s done to you, Noma. This is…is this a trick for me? Lucifer playing with me?”

“Lucifer’s gone,” Alex reminds him, and kisses him again. As Michael’s mouth parts against his he feels Noma’s lips whisper against his shoulder, curved upwards in a tiny hopeful smile.

This time, when they part, they’re both breathing hard. Noma has pushed herself onto Alex’s bed, against his side, and she reaches across to press her fingers into Michael’s thigh.

“ _Forgive_ ,” she says, sounding so terribly wise, “Forgive me, forgive Father. Forgive _yourself_.”

 

 

**RAPHAEL**

 

She finds them on the edge of Mallory.

Their cumbersome car is parked behind them, Alex talking to one of the humans, giving some final instructions. Sending them to the nearest stronghold, no doubt. This species always bolts like rabbits for the nearest enclosed space.

She shades her eyes against the blistering sun, feels the reassuring strength of her wings at her back; beats them idly to stir a breeze. Michael turns from where he is stood just behind Alex and sees her. Their eyes meet, and he excuses himself with a murmured reassurance.

Noma turns to watch him go and dips her head when she notices Raphael. The archangel does not return the greeting. Unflustered, Noma watches Michael a second longer, then returns her attention to Alex.

“So much for the power of the Chosen One,” Raphael comments lazily as her brother paces closer. “As ever, we cleaned up the mess while the human lay there useless.”

Michael doesn’t rise. He plants himself, solid as a tree, and gazes across at her. Her serious little brother.

“His power’s not in the strength of his arm,” he tells her gently, soft and wise, “It’s in the way he brings people together. Brings _us_ together, even. I thought I would never again see the day that you and I and Gabriel fought side by side as siblings. Yet there we stood. He gives us all faith.”

He’s fond and proud and desperately, dangerously tied to the boy. Raphael hisses a sigh out from between clenched teeth. She so hopes he knows what he is doing.

“Go back to your hiding place, Raphael,” he says—but says it kindly. His hair is falling into his face and his eyes are so, so sad for her. “Uriel will come back. Father will make another body for her and he’ll bring her back when he comes.”

“How do you know he’ll be back at all?”

She curses herself for the weakness. For the wretched wistful way her voice comes out. Michael just smiles, slowly and softly.

When he opens his mouth, she knows exactly what he’s going to say.

“ _Faith_.”

He presses his hand over his heart and murmurs a low promise in Lishepus—a vow to bring their father back at any cost. And then he smiles at her again and turns on his heel, striding back over to where the human and the angel wait.

She watches as he reaches them. Noma presses a hand against his arm, meets his gaze for a second and then tosses her eyes back towards Raphael. They are wary this time, suspicious and protective. Raphael bites back a snort. What threat is Noma to her?

She ignores the part of herself that says, _maybe quite a potent one, should she need to be_.  Because of course it’s not just Noma, and Noma is not just a soldier stepping between her superior and a bullet.

Alex has stepped up to Michael’s other side, left the other humans to begin to make their own way to a new home. He’s cupped his hand around the back of Michael’s neck, so casually intimate, and is muttering something comforting if the way the tension begins to leak out of her brother is any indication.

 The picture they paint pulls the breath right out of Raphael’s chest. That easy closeness, that fast-settled surety. The way they lean towards each other like they don’t even realise they’re doing it. Like a whole new future has suddenly opened up before them, bright and full of hope.

She can’t bear it.

She throws herself into the sky before she has to look a moment longer. Has to be reminded that she has nothing now—no father , no home,  no sister in her head.

She will not begrudge Michael Alex and Noma. Not if they help him bring their father back.

“Faith,” his voice echoes in her head.

 _Faith_ , Raphael tells herself, angling into the sun.


End file.
